Chemical sensors are significant due to their ability to optimize efficiency and/or ensure safety. In many industrial settings, harsh operational conditions prevent the deployment of such sensors into locations where safety hazards or operational inefficiencies originate. Given such deployments, many processes can be made safer and more efficient.
The presence of reactive substances and/or elevated temperatures and hydrogen in the same environment or enclosure can result in highly exothermic reactions that form products that can undergo further reactions with the materials present in the environment. An increase in temperature within such an environment exponentially increases the rate of reaction and therefore increases the possibility of explosion, which could result in workplace injury and/or facility destruction. Currently, no sensors appear to be suitable due to the severity of the environment, which causes rapid degradation of the materials used, leading to sensing failure.
Similarly, presence of reactive substances and molecules of hydrocarbon alkane gases, CxHy, in a common environment/enclosure can result in highly exothermic reactions that, under controlled conditions, serve as our main power source, but under uncontrolled conditions can result in explosions that cause workplace injury and facility destruction. In addition, the growing concerns regarding the coupled achievements of increased energy efficiency and reduced environmental degradation during the burning of hydrocarbon-based fossil fuels for power generation has led to a significant need for in-situ process monitoring of the concentrations of hydrocarbon gases. However, most sensors are incapable of in-situ process monitoring due to the inability to operate in either severe thermal environments, such as the elevated temperatures caused by the exothermic combustion reactions required for power generation, or in anaerobic and corrosive environments such as sea water that would be encountered during monitoring to detect the presence of hydrocarbons under the ocean floor and groundwater contamination from, e.g., fractures in shales, leading to release of natural gas.